<p>Interestingly, from the 2007 figures, Stanford had an $18.8 billion endowment, including the "merged pool" (financial and real estate assets)</p>
<p>The</a> Stanford Management Company - Endowment Asset Allocation </p>
<p>whereas other sources quote $17.2 billion. The home page of the site supports the former:</p>
<p>The</a> Stanford Management Company - W E L C O M E </p>
<p>A normal google result, though, takes you to The</a> Stanford Management Company - W E L C O M E , which puts the endowment assets at $21.6 billion (that'd be a respectable 26% return, competitive with Yale's), which is possibly the new figure for 2008. I don't think official reports come out until September or so.</p>
Bourne
August 2, 2008, 3:14pm
2
<p>
Another way that the Commonfund analyzes the data is by looking at characteristics of top performing endowments — grouping together top decile and top quartile performers. One characteristic of these groups is that they were large to start with. But the top performers also invest in different ways.</p>
<p>Top decile endowments had about 52 percent of their investments in “alternative” allocations — meaning hedge funds, venture funds and so forth — instead of the more traditional mix of stocks and bonds. For top quartile funds, the alternative percentage was 47 percent. For everyone in the study, the percentage was 42 percent. Leading endowments tended to keep only small percentages of their funds in cash, and to be reducing investments in energy and natural resources.</p>
<p>Over the past two years, there has been a shift — across most endowment sizes — away from domestic equities and fixed-income investments and toward international equities and alternative investments.</p>
<p>Asset Allocations of College Endowments, 2005-7</p>
<p>Asset class
<p>Domestic equities
<p>Fixed income
<p>International equities
<p>Alternative strategies
<p>Short-term securities and cash
</p>
<p>Does the 17.3 number exclude Natural Resources?</p>
<p>I wonder how different the composites are for the top universities.</p>